Excerpt From A Book I’ll (Probably) Never Publish
It’s 2.39am and today, I’ve made three observations.
- It’s a little too cold for a mid July summers day.
- I’ve run out of milk.
- I think I’m in trouble.
Let’s focus on the third point for a moment, because, well, the weather will change and milk shall be bought and that’s the extent of that. The trouble I speak of, however, shows no lenience in shifting or morphing or easing or dulling. It’s a very serious kind of trouble; one that has a fragile exterior made from fragments of sleepless nights, liquor bottle caps and beach sand, held together with guitar strings and coffee cup stirrers and hushed gentle lyrics. It’s a trouble that hits you hard, that knocks you down on the highway and before you know it, you’re under a pile up of cars and trucks and bikes and you’re waiting to be cut out and dissected and reconstructed by a hospital surgeon with a vast knowledge of where organs belong. He’ll take out my heart and after holding it in the palm of his hand, he’ll declare it not mine and, regardless, connect it back up to my arteries and bend my ribs over to protect it from physical harm.
My heart is not mine. It works for me, it beats for another. If it were to talk, it would say a name that is not my own.
It is a sickly thing, to love another. It is a dangerous thing to vocalise such monstrous words, to write a love song and to sing it, to write a love letter and to post it. To allow another to walk in time with yourself should be the easiest thing to do in the world, because it’s what we all starve for. Affection and love, admiration and companionship. Yet to admit it to the one who’s name ricochets around your ribcage seems nauseatingly impossible.
This is my cowardly way of admitting such things.
I can remember the first words you said to me, an East Coast twang with a bare toothed grin. I can still feel the shiver of the first time you kissed me, lust defeating politeness. I was mid sentence.
You shouldn’t pay attention to the minute details, to the intonation and glisten of suggestion that lies behind words from soft lips. You shouldn’t fall into the eyes of a person who’s heart is scattered across the world, kept in silk pockets of exotic women and cotton bedsheets of American sweethearts. Running fingertips over sun kissed skin, showered with freckles, tracing over the fingers of others before: mothers, dancers, friends, foes, all sharing the common goal of stealing away delicate memories to keep locked away, I breathe in and close my eyes.
Our soundtrack most nights is traffic. We are woken by the sun kissing our eyelids and midday straining its neck to greet us. Drowsy from whiskey and my throat cut from cigarettes, it doesn’t matter, because you don’t care. Sometimes, you stare at me and I pretend I’m unaware but honestly, I can feel your eyes etching away at my skin. It’s an addictive pain. We stare at art for hours, pulling it apart to see the brush strokes that create depth, that hide mistakes, to see deeper into the story. I’d never class myself as a masterpiece, but you make me feel like I’m close to one.
It could be so perfect, it could my love, but perfection lies little outside the printed words of a romance novel.
There’s always been another.
She’s always been here, even if her eyes haven’t met mine. I can feel her. She’s a ghost that lingers just two paces behind. She wraps herself around you when you’re asleep next to me, she whispers in your ear sweet nothings from a sunset over a sunrise. Eyes aflame with a love so pure, it would blind those who aren’t yet jaded from this cruel game that we entangle ourselves in. ‘She’s nothing’. She’s somebody. She raises you from tables, pulls you mid drink and mid word, ears suddenly deaf and eyes unseeing those sat near you, sat around you. It doesn’t make me sad, that I’m not her, it makes me sad that you can’t recognise me anymore. You can’t fight what you can’t see, you can’t win against a living ghost with memories, hopes and expectations. If you’re going to bury me, wipe off her lipstick before throwing the soil atop my coffin.
I haven’t told you, I doubt I will. I’ll sit here, stagnant and alone, stabbing in the dark at where I stand concerning you. Us. I can’t collect your heart from them, but I won’t wait for you to gather your lost fragments either. I want to scream it at you, that I love you, but in doing so, will I lose you? You can say you’re whole but I can see the cracks, the gaps where another’s light shines through. So I’ll keep it at the bottom of my shopping list, below the milk.
